Go Daddy, which could hardly deny the problems since so many of its customers were affected, has given few details. It has a simple message on its site: “At 10:25 am PT, GoDaddy.com and associated customer services experienced intermittent outages. Services began to be restored for the bulk of affected customers at 2:43 pm PT. At no time was any sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised. We will provide an additional update within the next 24 hours. We want to thank our customers for their patience and support.”
Meanwhile, the Anonymous Own3r Twitter account lit up with congratulatory tweets from other hackers. Anonymous Own3r himself claims to be a major player within Anonymous – as many people do – and is probably in or from Brazil. He stressed several times that this was a solitary feat and not an act of the Anonymous collective. But we still don’t know what it was or how it was achieved. “While it isn't known whether they were under attack or simply suffering from a hardware or software failure en masse, that didn't stop a Twitter account from Brazil that is loosely affiliated with Anonymous from taking credit for the outage,” commented Chester Wisniewski in the Sophos NakedSecurity blog.
Nor is the motive clear. Commentators point to an anti-Go Daddy sentiment among the ’99%’ following its support for SOPA; but Go Daddy reversed its position some time ago – and it’s the 99% who comprise the majority of Go Daddy’s customers.
But perhaps the hack never happened. Perhaps, as Anonymous (@AnonyOps) joked, “Godaddy technician trips over ethernet cord, pulling it from edge router. Blames Anonymous,” and “Today a leaf fell off a tree. Anonymous took credit.” Go Daddy wouldn’t be the first major player who suffered a technical hitch that was subsequently ‘claimed’ by a hacker seeking kudos. Remember Twitter’s cascading bug?
We won’t know for certain until Go Daddy’s own explanation. In the meantime, the most likely culprit is simply a failure in its own DNS systems resulting in an epic outage.